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Solar and batteries can power the world

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Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#331

Post by AnthonyMouse »

germandiago wrote: post #165
Retric wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means w…

> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse t…

> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do.

The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.

It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.

Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.

It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#332

Post by asdff »

WillAdams wrote: post #329
asdff wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda funny how we invented a carbon neutral fuel system but we are like "lets only use it as a 15% mix" vs trying to design new engines for pure ethanol. You could fuel your car with hooch you made from yard waste.

But is it carbon neutral? How much energy in terms of calories does one get per acre? What is the equivalent energy input in terms of diesel and so forth?

Why would you use diesel as input when you are making fuel? Just use part of the fuel you are making as input for the next crop.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#334

Post by tialaramex »

mullingitover wrote: post #201
tencentshill wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.

Not one man, he's financially backed by the wealthiest people in the world and politically supported by millions. Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.

Trump's animus against wind in particular is definitely specific to the man. He was annoyed by a wind farm in Scotland. Trump of course thinks he's one of those old fashioned kings† (and the US has been annoyingly willing to go along with that, how are those "checks and balances" and your "co-equal branches of government" working out for you?) and so he thought the local government would go along with his whims and prohibit the wind farm but they did not.

I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.

† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#335

Post by subhobroto »

opo wrote: post #199
balderdash wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather people went rooftop solar, and put that land to producing food.

The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations. The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA) because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to th…

> Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on their roof

I don't think you thought this up yourself, so I won't blame you for it, as this exact, word for word swill is mindlessly repeated by a lot of people, so thats ample evidence of brainwashing going on.

The subsidies and retail rate (both of which have been murdered by now thanks to swill like this) incentives were not a sneaky reverse welfare program snuck in by the wealthy.

They were infrastructure incentives for people who could afford to make those infrastructure investments.

Investments have always required incentives and a positive ROI. You don't put money into your 401k, Roth or HSA because you expect to lose money in 20 years.

The goal of solar subsidies was never some sneaky wealth redistribution with unforseen sideeffects but rather to rally support from the private industry and wealthy homes to spearhead rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization.

A single mother treading water, barely being able to afford groceries isn't your persona for actually making rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization happen - however, the wealthy that you so despise of, certainly put a 10kWh (sometimes more) PV array on their 3000 sqft rooftop and actually feed power to the grid that was reeling under tremendous growing strain.

People hanging portable solar panels from the balconies of their apartments barely make power to run their kitchen fridge so that's out as well.

Mom and pop landlords and corporate run apartments aren't going to put solar for their tenants because they are not legally allowed to sell power above utility rates while they don't enjoy the 10% guaranteed ROI that utilities get (which is where utilities actually make their money), so that's out too.

This makes me sad - We could have had a future where the grid was fully decentralized, where our single mother neighbor would never had to worry about the lights getting turned off even when there was a downed power line or wildfire or a snowstorm turning down power lines half a mile away, where she could plug in her EV into my shed instead of having to drive miles away to a crowded charging station.

We are numbers people here - so here's a numbers perspective:

If I had taken the same money I had to spend on a "grid compliant" installation (so I could connect all of this to the grid) and put it into the SNP500 instead, I would never have had to worry just about a power bill (as bad it is - $0.60/kWh) but also my inflation adjusted grocery bills for the rest of my life.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#336

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

pishpash wrote: post #217
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #116

This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda. The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,…

Or you are somewhere in Africa and have no electricity anyway so you start on something renewable.

African countries are some of the poorest on the planet. It takes a very large capital investment, in addition to skilled labor, to energize a nation. They often have other bigger issues to deal with. It's often way cheaper to pay for humans to mine coal, produce charcoal, extract oil (not uncommonly a private company - or a country like China - extracting the resources and making a big profit, or giving a loan with a huge interest payment).

But let's look at a single off-grid DIY example. First you need the expertise to hook it up. If you have the skill, it still isn't cheap if your economy is weak. It requires saving money for a capital purchase, something people all around the world struggle with. And when there are payment programs, they're often exploitative.

It's not like people in Africa aren't aware solar power exists. If it was cheap and easy, everyone would have done it already.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#337

Post by panick21_ »

adrian_b wrote: post #234
panick21_ wrote: post #16

Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear,…

Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that. There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light. The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, wh…

> Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.

Using heat is the most efficient and if you use nuclear heat directly, and you don't have to go to the step of converting to electricity, you get huge efficiency.

> There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel

Nuclear fuel is not valuable once you have a closed cycle. Fuel cost are already only a few % of total nuclear cost and in a closed cycle would be almost nothing. As soon as you breed fuel from fertile material the cost is basically 0.

> The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable.

It requires a very large plant to do in many small batches and cost 20x what hydrogen costs from natural gas. Its not efficient and will not be for the next 20+ years at least.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#338

Post by enslavedrobot »

opo wrote: post #199
balderdash wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather people went rooftop solar, and put that land to producing food.

The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations. The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA) because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to th…

Rooftop solar in Australia is ~60cents per Watt installed.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#339

Post by uecker »

lazide wrote: post #155
turtlebits wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid. For regular homes, it just means less savings.

It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales. It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.

Germany has more wind in winter, so traditionally has more production of renewables in winter months.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#340

Post by panick21_ »

tenthirtyam wrote: post #30
panick21_ wrote: post #16

Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear,…

IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.

First of all its not that slow, and when you know when you need it, at what point in the day, so you can ramp up in anticipation.

Also, the claim that nuclear is slow to change is a limitation of current nuclear plants, more modern plants could be far better. Some designs are very much load following.

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